I did a complete suspension, brake, and steering rebuild last year. I choose the Spohn front end rebuild kit. Installation went fine.

Fast forward to today and about 1000 miles later.

I had to remove my centerlink in order to install a new oil pan. When I went to reinstall the centerlink, one of the inner tie rod studs and then one of the centerlink studs stripped out before reaching the GM spec torque of 35 ft-lb. This is only the second time the castle nuts had been tightened.

I am a religious torque wrench user and have no reason to believe my torque wrench is out of spec.

At this time I cannot recommend the Spohn front end rebuild kit and all of my steering linkage will be replaced with MOOG components.

John

 

Have you tried contacting Spohn about it? Steve use to be very good at customer support/service.

 

No I have not, but I certainly plan to. In any case, I'm still going with the MOOG stuff. I refuse to wait for Spohn to decide what to do just as the weather is starting to get nice here.

I do agree, Spohn has good customer service. I have purchased thousands of dollars of parts from them and they have always been good to me.

 

Any updates on what happened after you contacted Spohn. Any reason why the Spohn parts failed ? Did they fix it?
I always wondered , what kind of warrenty do Spohn parts have compared to say Moog or TRW.

 

im sure Spohn doesnt forge their own steering parts. they are just relabeled parts.

FWIW, sombody else had a PST setup fail too recently.

wonder who spohn uses?

 

I used a Spohn kits several years ago now and at that time it was all Moog parts, just sold as a kit.

 

Great. Mine arrives from UPS on Tuesday...

 

I used Spohns bolts for a rebuild on attaching the strut to spindle. 3 of the 4 failed and stripped before reaching GM's tq spec. I reused stock 90K bolts with no problem.

 

No doubt. They may use different moving parts though. The grease cap does say Spohn on it, so at a minimum they were at least goofed with at some point.

 

They are not reboxed Moog parts. They have a very different coating as well. They have a very nice Zinc plating while the stock Moogs are painted. They may be Moog's but they have had some work done on them.

 

My recommendation is to check the fit of the nuts provided. I suspect that is where my problem started. My nuts fit looser than I would have expected. If they don't fit tight get some new ones and you should be good to go.

 

We aren't talking about spindle botls. We are talking about front end rebuild kits. However I have used Spohn's spindle bolts with no issue.

 

Ok here are a bunch of pictures showing the difference. Maybe someone can compare them to the PST parts. These are Spohn (silver) vs MOOG (black).

 

Here you can see the damaged threads.